[HN Gopher] AT&T lawyer stopped Plan 9 release CD with songs by ...
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AT&T lawyer stopped Plan 9 release CD with songs by Lou Reed,
Debbie Harry
Author : asjo
Score : 269 points
Date : 2022-06-25 17:19 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tuhs.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tuhs.org)
| jonahx wrote:
| I feel like part of the story is missing, or I am missing
| something... why couldn't they just confirm the releases?
| blihp wrote:
| The lawyer didn't care... they just used their power to block
| the release. Since it wasn't something that mattered to them,
| they likely never gave it a second thought. This isn't terribly
| uncommon (it's not just an issue with lawyers, but with any
| corporate gatekeeper) in the business world.
| jonahx wrote:
| So there was no mechanism to appeal the decision, presumably?
| Lawyer says "nope", gives bullshit reason, and that's it?
| Nothing further to be done?
| salmo wrote:
| Usually you _can_ , but it better be worth it. You'll have
| to get an officer to say they're willing to accept the risk
| with a high level legal counsel.
|
| If you tossed this idea up to that level, you'd piss the
| officer off for wasting his time and burn the relationship
| with the lawyer.
|
| Also, this team was pretty infamous at that point for not
| playing nice with the corporate structure (eg naming the OS
| Plan 9). Sure, they were rockstars to nerds, but Unix, etc.
| never made Bell/AT&T real money. Wasn't their fault, but
| they never got internal clout and were just a small, weird
| group in a giant company.
| dleslie wrote:
| Probably not, no; because to cross the corporate power
| broker is to invite their wrath. It will make future asks
| of them impossible, or at least costly.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Yeah I am doubting this too. The lawyer identifies a potential
| legal problem (clearances) that would have been trivial to
| solve. For about $50 you can file a copyrighted work with the
| librarian of Congress and get an officially USA-branded
| certificate of copyright ownership, and it only takes a couple
| of weeks. This is a norm in the creative industry because if
| you have filed your copyrighted work and it is later infringed,
| you can claim punitive damages as well as recoup your loss.
| morcheeba wrote:
| I read it as not a clearance problem, but that the lawyer
| didn't know who Lou Reed and Debbie Harry were and didn't
| want to release music from some randos the developers had
| found.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Yeah, because actual randos could be people doing cover
| versions of music they don't own. But one could respond to
| this with 'they're successful recording artists, I can get
| the documentation you need right away.'
| Isamu wrote:
| I don't think you have experienced the politics of high level
| executives in mega corporations. This is exactly the most
| plausible part of the story. Some legal executive likely
| jumped to some conclusion before talking to Rob to get all
| the facts, and didn't want to walk back his position because
| he is so much more important than the tiny Unix group that it
| was easier to just kill it.
|
| Remember Plan9 was not going to make money enough for any
| executive to care.
| [deleted]
| WalterBright wrote:
| When I developed the first native C++ compiler around 1987, I
| thought I'd better check with AT&T's lawyers if I could:
|
| 1. sell a C++ compiler
|
| 2. call it C++
|
| Their lawyer was very nice, and said sure. He also laughed and
| said he appreciated that I was the only one who bothered to ask.
| donarb wrote:
| I recall that Microsoft's Visual C++ user license had a clause
| that forbid you from creating a C++ compiler with it.
| WalterBright wrote:
| P.S. Bjarne Stroustrup and especially Andrew Koenig were super
| nice and supportive of my efforts in those days. The nascent
| C++ community was very welcoming.
| cgriswald wrote:
| In the early internet days, when I was young and learning HTML,
| the book I used to learn recommended _asking permission_ to
| link to a website. I thought that was weird, but I was a rule
| follower then. So I, a kid, sent a message to the 'webmaster'
| of a local government site and dutifully asked permission to
| link to their home page.
|
| The said no.
|
| If I'm ever a super-villain, I'm using this as my origin story.
| WalterBright wrote:
| On the other hand, I've consistently found you can often get
| what you want just by asking for it. A lot of people seem
| unwilling to do this.
| zarmin wrote:
| On the other other hand, ask for forgiveness not
| permission.
| WalterBright wrote:
| More than one person has come to me with a story that
| they'd developed a side project without notifying their
| employer, and now that it was done and they were
| distributing it were worried their employer was going to
| claim ownership.
|
| I didn't have anything helpful to say. I've done side
| projects when I was working for Big Corps, but in every
| case notified management beforehand and got a written ok.
| Never had any trouble with it. When I've accepted job
| offers, I'd also provide a list of projects that were
| mine and had them sign off on it as a condition of
| employment. Never encountered any resistance to that,
| either.
|
| But these poor people were sweating bullets imagining all
| the bad consequences of their employer finding out.
|
| Just ask, in advance. If you're a valuable employee,
| they'll say ok. Never heard of one saying no. And they'll
| appreciate that you asked instead of sneaking around.
|
| But be careful not to use company equipment.
| zarmin wrote:
| How about, thoroughly read your employment agreement (and
| everything you sign).
|
| > Just ask, in advance. If you're a valuable employee
|
| That is a massive, massive if.
| megablast wrote:
| Thanks for all the examples.
| effingwewt wrote:
| Still boggles my mind reading things like this- so cool to hear
| origin stories from the horse's mouth, so to speak. But if he
| hadn't been nice what would have happened?
|
| I'm sad to imagine the future we are headed towards where only
| new technologies are worked on, just to get the patents and sit
| on them, while everything pre-existing is deprecated and
| abandoned. Microsoft's embrace extend extinguish works eerily
| well.
|
| Do you think we are headed in a better direction now? Or is it
| simply different?
|
| I remember working with ATT in the late 90's when it was ATT
| broadband. They were still using green screen computer terminal
| windows for everything and were trying to get a GUI off the
| ground. Everything was alt and tab to switch windows etc, no
| mouse support! Into the mid 2000's! This was done by getting
| regular employees to try and cobble something together. The
| miraculous thing was that they pulled it off. Just took them a
| few years longer than it should have. ATT 'corporate' was known
| for being every bit the tv trope of a big business back then.
|
| I remember seeing early builds and laughing it was so bad. ATT
| in particular was very much stuck in its ways as a corporation
| and was not inclined to change even the most broken of things.
|
| When it finally rolled out it was such a mess. All the IT
| people could do was wince. Everyone but the people who mattered
| saw it coming. They hired some firm to re-do it all. That
| happened who knows how many times within just a few years after
| that. Went from refusing to update to doing it constantly and
| always breaking things.
|
| I must say it was pretty insane watching $12k long distance
| bills from calls to, for instance India, get re-rated to
| several dollars.
|
| Wondered how accurate the accounting could possibly be with so
| many inaccurate and fungible dollar amounts floating around.
|
| Edit to add- years later I was working as an HVAC service
| technician and had to do some work at cell phone towers, server
| locations (wasn't really server farms back then), and phone
| agent locations for all cell phone carriers in Albuquerque, NM.
|
| It felt surreal to see bow fast and far the companies had
| gotten in only a few short years. Companies (especially ATT)
| that couldn't figure out basic things about computers were at
| the cutting edge of like all the technology they used. ACs were
| top of the line Lieberts, they had _all_ proprietary software
| on everything. The super remote cell phone towers had AC,
| power, storage, and communications redundancy. Their security
| had been beefed up to top tier. Contractors all needed top tier
| security clearance now.
|
| I don't know if it was the Kevin Mitnick generation of phone
| phreaks, hackers, and social engineering, or the world in
| general, or a change in CEO but it was kind of like watching
| the titanic become some super-advanced space-faring time-
| warping ship.
|
| That had kinda given me hope that- damn, maybe we can enter the
| new age jumping in with both feet. As a kid it felt like
| progress had been so slow!
| WalterBright wrote:
| > But if he hadn't been nice what would have happened?
|
| I would have tried to negotiate a deal. If that failed, I
| would have abandoned making a C++ compiler.
|
| Consider that at the time C++ and ObjectiveC were neck and
| neck, judging by the message volume on newnews. I rejected
| doing O-C because Stepstone demanded royalties for
| implementing it.
|
| When Zortech C++ was released, an inexpensive native C++
| compiler that was well-adapted to the 16 bit DOS model, C++
| took off, and O-C sputtered and died. If AT&T had also
| demanded royalties, C++ would have been a failure, as cfront
| was not very practical.
|
| 90% of programming in those days was done on DOS, and Zortech
| C++ was top of the heap. If I may say so, Zortech C++ gave
| C++ the critical mass it needed to surge ahead.
|
| My partner made the mistake of telling Eugene Wang of Borland
| how well ZTC++ was selling, and from the look on Eugene's
| face I knew we'd made a big mistake. Borland did an abrupt
| change in direction and went all in on Turbo C++. And the
| rest, as they say, is history. Microsoft also soon abandoned
| its object extensions to C and went with C++.
| skissane wrote:
| > Microsoft also soon abandoned its object extensions to C
| and went with C++.
|
| Anyone have any info on what those abandoned Microsoft
| extensions were?
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| Thank you for giving these details. I feel like AI is the
| next step in some kind of implementation war after
| languages and then browsers.
| ianai wrote:
| Does C++ have much of an AI/ML implementation? I saw
| something recently about the language missing a good
| AI/ML framework since there was no way to do proper
| differentiation (might be the wrong term, sorry).
| rawbot wrote:
| dlib is pretty good: http://dlib.net/
| doovd wrote:
| This doesn't make much sense, for two reasons: 1. Various
| ML libraries are implemented in C++ and have wrappers for
| respective interpreted languages. 2. Given higher-level
| languages can do auto-diff, c++ as a lower-level language
| is likely to be able to do it (and it can).
|
| It just doesn't have as popular libraries such as
| python/R etc given the latter are far easier to work with
| + lower barriers for entry.
| umanwizard wrote:
| PyTorch is written in C++ and has a C++ API (although the
| most famous API is -- as the name suggests -- the Python
| one).
| chiph wrote:
| My graphics class instructor was Jack Bresenham. The class
| was given in Borland's Turbo Pascal, but I asked for
| permission to write my code in the then-new Turbo C++
| (since Jack knew C, I was sure he'd allow it).
|
| It came time to demo our work. Everyone else's code ran at
| least 5 times faster than mine. How could this be? Well,
| the Turbo C++ compiler was on the "immature" side at that
| time and produced really inefficient binaries. While the
| Borland Pascal compiler was mature and created code that
| ran really quite fast. Lesson learned. :)
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| That's what you get for not having the foresight to pick
| the compiler written by the guy who would go on to create
| C# and TypeScript [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg
| vkazanov wrote:
| Optimising compiler is not the same business as a
| language implementation :-) related but not the same at
| all
| effingwewt wrote:
| Man, it really is history. Crazy to think had things been a
| little different how different would things be today. If
| kid me knew one day I'd run across this in an online forum
| I don't think I'd have believed it.
|
| As others said- thanks for sharing the insights, made my
| week.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It's the Butterfly Effect, for sure.
| dekhn wrote:
| One of my favorite tech books is 'The Idea Factory' which
| covers various periods of innovation at (AT&T) Bell Labs,
| including the creation of the first real cell phone
| technology.
|
| When I first got Pacific Bell (now part of AT&T) DSL in
| California in the early 2000s, it was run by a seperate
| division of the company, "Emerging Products Division". i
| always assumed that was because the traditional side of
| PacBell just didn't get digital at all and the leadership
| kept them apart to avoid the innovator's dilemma.
| effingwewt wrote:
| Definitely going to give that a read. Now that you both
| mention it, many BigCo's did have fragmented segments back
| then, were I suppose now everything is helmed by the head
| (Alphabet/Google).
|
| Maybe it was some kind of turning point. Also about that
| time did CEO age drop through the floor? They went from all
| being ancient to mostly 40 and under somewhere along the
| line.
|
| Thanks for the book suggestion!
| gumby wrote:
| > When I first got Pacific Bell (now part of AT&T) DSL in
| California in the early 2000s, it was run by a seperate
| division of the company, "Emerging Products Division". i
| always assumed that was because the traditional side of
| PacBell just didn't get digital at all and the leadership
| kept them apart to avoid the innovator's dilemma.
|
| This technique had previously been used by IBM to the the
| PC out: they built a whole division from scratch in Boca
| Raton away from the IBM mother ship in NY
| ianai wrote:
| I definitely wish more recent tech had gone the
| standardized way similar to how IBM standardized computer
| building. We're into four decades of being able to build
| PCs from customized/off the shelf parts because IBM
| didn't go the "make it impossible"/proprietary route.
| gumby wrote:
| Actually that credit goes to COMPAQ. IBM used commodity
| parts to save money but it was COMPAQ who famously cloned
| the BIOS a and made IBM-alikes against IBM's wishes.
|
| But by then the cat was out of the bag: IBM tried to
| achieve a proprietary beachhead with Micro Channel (and
| OS/2) but that added value for IBM, not the customer.
| com2kid wrote:
| Don't forget that Microsoft maintained momentum in this
| area. MS loved having open standards because it let MS
| pit OEMs against each other, causing hardware prices to
| drop while Windows license prices stayed the same.
| ineedasername wrote:
| I asked a (great) boss I had once if we should get the legal
| department's opinion on something very minor. They had a great
| response, which was that nothing-- unless absolutely necessary by
| policy or significant risk-- should ever be given to them unless
| we wanted to wait 6 months for them to tell us "no".
|
| YMMV based on the nature of issues your legal folks have to deal
| with on a regular basis. In our case, anything outside of
| standard contract review they had a reputation of being a
| nightmare to deal with.
| mynameishere wrote:
| The legal department is useful if your boss wanted to scuttle
| something.
|
| https://dilbert.com/strip/1993-01-31
| iasay wrote:
| That sounds like our purchasing department. AWS always gets
| business first now because we don't have to raise a PO
| james_in_the_uk wrote:
| If you are doing something that isn't significantly risky and
| isn't identified by policy as likely to give rise to a
| significant risk, then you don't need to ask a company lawyer.
|
| If you ask them anyway, it might take a while to get a reply,
| because they'll be prioritising significant risks.
| anarchy89 wrote:
| Anyone know what the file format they used was?
| pdw wrote:
| It must have been an early version of AAC. Bell was involved
| with that. And another message in the thread claims "the early
| versions of the audio compression stuff were not quite is good
| as the later versions (which became apples stuff)"
| Maursault wrote:
| Regarding the early formats' fidelity, the defense Napster
| should have won with was that the plaintiff's assumption that
| digital copies _were any good_ was false. The mp3s in
| question were barely broadcast quality, thus sharing low
| bitrate mp3 was not any different from sharing recordings of
| broadcast radio, a legal activity.
| MisterTea wrote:
| PAC - Perceptual Audio Coder
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_Audio_Coder
|
| https://marc.info/?l=9fans&m=111558697616455&w=2
| Bayart wrote:
| I wish I was as cool as Rob Pike.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| People questioning whether the lawyer really had the power to
| block this don't know how legal departments in big corporations
| work, as others have pointed out.
|
| A lawyer usually cannot get in trouble for saying No. They can
| only get in trouble for saying Yes. They feel they're doing their
| jobs by saying No and they'll also use the phrase "out of an
| abundance of caution."
|
| The lawyer's supervisor is _very_ rarely going to overrule him or
| her and say Yes. They will just say "it's their case, they're in
| charge." They defer to each other that way.
|
| This probably seems excessively cynical to you. Indeed it doesn't
| always turn out this way. Sometimes rationality prevails.
| tgv wrote:
| It's called liability, isn't it? Lawyers only go out of their
| way to rationalize something when it's deemed profitable.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| The question that should be asked is not "can we do this?" but
| "what do we need to do to make this happen?"
| s3ctor8 wrote:
| This holds true for a number of situations where approval is
| required. For me it's particularly helpful when looking for
| IT/Information Security approval. "What actions/precautions
| do you recommend I take, so that you will approve this when
| you are asked to (and we are implementing a secure
| solution)?"
| userbinator wrote:
| _A lawyer usually cannot get in trouble for saying No. They can
| only get in trouble for saying Yes. They feel they 're doing
| their jobs by saying No and they'll also use the phrase "out of
| an abundance of caution."_
|
| Hence why the phrase "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than
| permission" exists.
| [deleted]
| tlrobinson wrote:
| I've found good corporate lawyers will summarize the risks of
| taking some action and ask you (or higher up leadership) to
| weight those against the business case for taking said action.
| dekhn wrote:
| Agreed, I worked with some very good lawyers at Google who
| understood the technical details and the context outside of
| corporate/industry. It wasn't always default 'no', especially
| if you knew how to ask the questions properly. It was default
| 'maybe and here's why'.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| In fact, I was in Google Patent Litigation, and that's
| largely where that came from.
|
| But you're right: you have to prepare the ground very
| carefully when you ask for legal advice. If you just ask
| out of the blue "can we do this?" you're asking for
| trouble.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| Agreed. When I deal with our legal counsel, I often try to
| draw him out to determine how I need to prioritize my team's
| work. Generally he declines to give me any firm yes or no,
| and just tells me where he sees risks.
| [deleted]
| duxup wrote:
| The few times I was involved in "we should ask legal"
| situations and it wasn't the most obvious yes... I just checked
| out after that as some legal drone always came back with some
| "no" and sometimes some really wonky situations they made up
| that frankly read more like some random internet legal expert
| rather than someone with training.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Yes, indeed. I could tell a great story, but just doing that
| would _itself_ violate a No some lawyer gave me.
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _A lawyer usually cannot get in trouble for saying No. They
| can only get in trouble for saying Yes._
|
| This. AND: There's seldom if ever much near-term _personal_
| upside for the lawyer, just downside if things go wrong --- and
| lawyers are a natural target for business people to point the
| fingers at if things do go wrong, because they 're of different
| tribes.
|
| Warren Buffett's longtime business partner Charlie Munger
| famously said, "Never a year passes but I get some surprise
| that pushes a little further my appreciation of incentive
| superpower. * * * Never, ever, think about something else when
| you should be thinking about the power of incentives." [0]
|
| That said, _good_ business lawyers think of themselves as kinda
| being business people with legal training, assessing _all_ the
| relevant risks and making recommendations for the business. (I
| tell my students: Try to think as though you were the CEO --
| but remember that you 're not.)
|
| https://perma.cc/LNG7-JG6Y.
| Beldin wrote:
| That comment about the stack of CDs mysteriously disappearing
| right from under the presenter's nose while he kept on fiddling
| with his slides is hilarious.
| [deleted]
| nailer wrote:
| There was also VQF from Yamaha, people seriously had discussions
| on whether MP3 or VQF would become the dominant format.
|
| Oh also Fraunhofer uploaded the mp3 source to the ISO website for
| years with no license, let the community build on it for years (I
| feel like they knew) and then asked everyone for a minimum of 10K
| USD.
| RajT88 wrote:
| VQF was indeed better. Smaller files, same fidelity.
|
| I cannot remember all of them now, but there was a few like
| that.
| kybernetyk wrote:
| Fun fact: Apple's CoreAudio to this day can't output MP3. It
| can read it fine just not write it. :)
| bitwize wrote:
| Even Bill Gates knows you let people pirate the product first,
| then squeeze them for license fees.
| overeater wrote:
| This stories reminds me of the times before tech dominance, when
| programmers and innovators needed to get permission to do almost
| anything. Tech people were not allowed to run companies, or even
| manage people -- you needed MBAs for that.
|
| Anything "disruptive" would be immediately shut down and
| threatened from the dominant industry. Anti-societal violence in
| video games were under constant protest (like the original Grand
| Theft Auto, or Mortal Kombat), and don't even think about trying
| to start a business like Uber or Spotify.
|
| New file formats could be immediately crushed by IP concerns.
| Even web pages posting content about circumventing current
| systems or linking to sites like that were targeted. If you
| weren't a big player, you didn't have any way to accept money
| (besides asking people to mail you checks).
|
| While tech is seen as too powerful now, I think it's at least
| nice that we no longer have the anxiety that plagued any idea or
| project in the past. You don't have to worry about going to jail
| for programming crypto code, or be unable to find a hosting
| provider for your website that shows scraped public data.
| justinclift wrote:
| > we no longer have the anxiety that plagued any idea or
| project in the past.
|
| __cough__ Patents __cough__.
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